Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition is a little box with big privacy powers
Home Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That’s why Home Assistant is calling it a “Preview Edition.”
Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloud—or your own capable computer—to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the rough footprint of a modern Apple TV but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused goal. Start with a wake word—the default, and most well-trained version, is “Okay, Nabu,” but “Hey, Jarvis” and “Hey, Mycroft” are available. Follow that with a command, typically something that targets a smart home device: “Turn on living room lights,” “Set thermostat to 68,” “Activate TV time.” And then, that thing usually happens.
Home Assistant’s Voice Preview Edition, doing what it does best. I had to set a weather service to an alias of “the weather outside” to get that response worked out.
“That thing” is primarily controlling devices, scenes, and automations around your home, set up in Home Assistant. That means you have to have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, too, but it’s a bit more important with the VPE.
You won’t need to start over with all your gear if you’ve got a Google Home, Alexa, or Apple Home ecosystem, at least. Home Assistant has good “bridge” options built into it for connecting all the devices you’ve set up and named inside those ecosystems.
It’s important to have a decently organized smart home set up with a VPE box, because it doesn’t really do much else, for better or worse. Unless you hook it up to an AI model.
The voice device that is intentionally not very chatty
The VPE box can run timers (with neat LED ring progress indicators), and with a little bit of settings tweaking, you can connect it to Home Assistant’s built-in shopping lists and task lists or most any other plug-in or extension of your system. If you’re willing to mess with LLMs—like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini—locally or through cloud subscriptions, you could trigger prompts with your voice, though performance will vary.
